June 2013

Anne Wehr of Time Out New York reviews Land Use Survey in the magazine's latest issue, writing:

These days, the U.S. of A. has ever fewer places where one can tremble before the natural sublime, so “Land Use Survey” offers a proportionate representation of strip malls, tract housing and swaths of paradise blighted and paved over.

She discusses several works from the exhibition, including the Beth Dow photograph above, noting:

Re-inhabited Circle K: Mr. Formal, Phoenix, AZ (2006), a photograph by Paho Mann, and twosmall canvases by Michelle Muldrow (both 2009) are all severe, frontal views of single-story suburban stores, each grimmer than the last. Other works underscore nature’s diminishment: In Gravel (2006), photographer Beth Dow uses shifting focus and the sensuous subtleties of palladium printing to make falsely romantic mountains out of rubbish-dotted molehills.

Read the complete review at Time Out New York and stop in to see the show before August 15th!

Gregory Krum's ...Practice..., on view at the gallery for just one more week till Sunday, June 27th, has been reviewed by Vince Aletti in The New Yorker, available to online (now) and in the forthcoming print issue of the magazine.

Aletti writes:

There are pictures of gravestones in the snow, artfully decorated interiors, and what appear to be night skies dense with stars. But a series of twenty-four unframed color photographs hung in a grid across from these images brings the exhibition into focus. Collectively titled “Offering,” they’re shots of the coconut-leaf baskets of flowers and food left at various public sites in Bali as gifts to the gods. Seen from above, these colorful packages are a more exotic form of Irving Penn’s urban debris, but even more allusive and alluring. Through June 27.

Sarah Fones of the The New York Times T Magazine Blog, The Moment writes about Gregory Krum's ...Practice... exhibition.

Photographic evidence — say, the kind of indefatigable proof that one has, in fact, visited the Great Wall of China — typically suffices as testament to having actually been there and done that. The photographer Gregory Krum (who is also the director of retail for the shop at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum) has been to the base of the Matterhorn and has seen the tombstones erected there in a climbers’ cemetery. The photos he took are on display as part of his first solo exhibition, “…Practice…,” at Jen Bekman Gallery in SoHo. These images, along with shots of flowers, dust, still-lifes and interiors also seek to illuminate something inherently more tenuous: devotion. “The idea behind the show is those things that become true solely by belief,” he says.

Belief is twofold in this instance, with Krum both exploring the confines of his own (in the guise of photographer) and that of others (embodied in inanimate objects left behind). The tombstone portraits, for example, are literal markers of a failed endeavor. Five interior shots evocative of Dutch still-lifes, including a tiny bedside porcelain skull (a nod to the tradition of vanitas) and a copy of Alcoholics Anonymous, examine the extent to which all manmade objects more literally communicate meaning. An orange rind might imply a sense of inevitable decay, while Ettore Sottsass’s Memphis-style lamp — not to mention Krum’s own corkboard of inspirations — impart the boundless capacity for human innovation and endurance. Finally, a series of 24 small photographs of devotional, sculpturelike offerings convey the idea of repetition and quotidian ritual, or as Krum puts it, “the daily practice.” Just as the spiritually inclined are compelled to participate in these rituals, so the artist is consumed by the desire to create.

Such belief systems are self-reflexive, Krum explains, and in fact the show itself became a sort of meta example of his own devotion. It also coincided with Krum’s fascination with the kind of books that act as personal bibles, outlining an artist’s rules of conduct and recasting the process as a daily spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic regimen. “A particularly good one is Gerhard Richter’s The Daily Practice of Painting,” Krum notes, “from which I ultimately stole the title of the show and postcard design.”

Read the article full article and view the accompanying slideshow here. ...Practice... is on view through June 27th, 2010.

Gregory's certainly got a knack for mixing high-design with thrift store finds to create a space that is uniquely his own. Throughout the house you will find Italian chairs and a custom-made bed frame mixed in with eclectic objects, art found at a thrift store, and several of Krum's own photographs.

The slideshow is accompanied by an article on Gregory's experience as an artist, in design retail, and details about his upcoming exhibition ...Practice..., which opens May 15th at Jen Bekman Gallery.

Gregory's sold out edition Chateau Pool can be spotted behind this plant with a pair of googly eyes (an homage to SNL).

Ms. Bingaman-Burt notes "black chucks are bad workout shoes" in an illustration accompanying this morning's Daily Candy weekend guide, which highly recommends you go out and pick up a copy of Kate's new book, Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?" Also the name of her long-running website, which documents her purchases of both the mundane and the occasional indulgence, Kate's book delights in its printed form. Or, as DC puts it, "Because buying it is delightfully meta." Signed copies are available if you order directly from Kate's website.

It's the real world you see in Nina Berman's tender but unflinching photographs of Ty Ziegel, a former Marine sergeant so badly disfigured by a suicide-bomb attack in Iraq that back home small children stare at him, even after 50 reconstructive surgeries. It would be obscene to aestheticize his situation, and Berman doesn't aim to. What she does is present it forthrightly, with compassion but without pathos — bravely, which is how he presents himself. We have to read a lot into Ziegel because his face sometimes seems to have a limited range of expression. Gently but firmly, Berman directs you to see the man behind the mask. Do these pictures belong in an art museum? Of course they do, because as long as one of the things art does is use images to teach, this is art.

The 2010 Whitney Biennial runs through May 30th in New York and, as TIME Magazine says, Berman's work is "not to be missed."

A photograph by Jen Bekman Gallery artist Nina Berman is featured in the Wall Street Journal today as part of an article titled "The Whitney Biennial Lightens Up". Kelly Crow writes, "The country's pre-eminent survey of new American art has a reputation for focusing on angry or anxious young things. But the latest edition, opening Feb. 25 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, aims to be something else: fun."

About Nina's work Kelly writes:

The biennial doesn't abandon politics altogether, but Mr. Bonami says he went looking for art that reflects the American psyche about war without being "bombastic." New York photographer Nina Berman is showing a series about the postwar daily life of former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel, who was severely disfigured in a car bomb in Iraq but returned home and married his fiancée, Renee Kline."

You can read the full article, which features a slideshow as well as profiles of Charles Ray and Aurel Schmidt, online or in today's print edition. More information about The Whitney Biennial: 2010 is available at the Whitney's website.

Every week design*sponge invites our collective desire for voyeurism to come out and feast on images posted in their sneak peeks column. Sneak peeks lets us into the homes of talented folks, and just yesterday Ms. Jen Bekman had the spotlight turned in her direction. It should not shock you to know that Jen's space is overflowing with art as colorful as a box of macarons from Ladurée. She is a lady who lives by her word: LIVE WITH ART, IT'S GOOD FOR YOU.

Here is what Jen had to say about the witty bit that graces the door of this establishment, "Live With Art, It's Good For You." -
"People think it is a tag line, but it is real. It really is what drives me. I want to help as many people as possible live with art." You have and you do! Read more online.

Nina Berman'sHomeland work was featured in an article and slide show on The New York Times blog Lens. Nina talks about her role as a photojournalist and about the work from her book and second show at Jen Bekman Gallery, Homeland.

Nina is able to walk the line between photojournalist and the fine art world through her eye and decision to shy away from objective photography by allowing her passion and voice to come through in her images. Nina say's, “I don’t believe in the notion of the objective photographer, that somehow a photo is balanced and you’re dispassionate,” she said. “I don’t think that would have value. That’s like a security camera.”